Back in October, The Reporters' Collective told you the inside story of the Coal Ministry’s irresistible urge to open up for mining two coal blocks located inside the densest forest of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh.
The Coal Ministry went against the Environment Ministry that had ringfenced the forests from miners and it vetoed its own expert body’s advice that the forests are too sensitive to carve out a mining block. All because an association of private power producers, one of whose members is Adani Group, lobbied with the coal ministry to open them up.
And we had told you that the lobbying was poised to benefit Adani, as one of the coalfields in Singrauli was close to thermal power plants Adani Group acquired in 2022, and the other was adjacent to the already existing Adani mines.
Adani Group did indeed benefit.
On 12 March 2024, an Adani Group firm, Mahan Energen Limited, bagged Mara II Mahan coal block in Madhya Pradesh holding 995 million tonnes of coal, show latest auction documents.
The Coal Ministry had not only acted on the association’s demand to open up the two blocks but also pushed for a review of the environment ministry’s suggestions in 2018 that 15 coal blocks should be exempt from coal mining auctions since they fall in areas that of high biodiversity value and need to be conserved.
Eventually, the Coal Ministry opened up four of the 15 coal blocks that the Environment Ministry had forbidden for mining. One of these four was the Madhya Pradesh-based block the Association of Power Producers had specifically lobbied for.
The manoeuver reminded me of a quote by historian Aditya Mukherjee in the book “The Billionaire Raj”: “The state still had a model of business in which you could grow hugely with the help of a government that favours and in return businesses would pour money into the political system.”
Read the story by Shreegireesh Jalihal on how one of the largest private electricity producers in India pushed the right buttons in the government to secure permission to slash through some of the densest green cover to mine coal.
Click here to read the entire report on The Reporters' Collective website.